Free, really?

I've had to think of one of my heroes lately: Goethe. Bright man, very insightful author, great quipper, who once wrote, "None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." It's the last part of the statement that gets me cogitating: how do we know whether we falsely or truly believe?

That's a tough one, especially these days when we can no longer think dialectically, that is that what causes one thing can at the same time perhaps cause its opposite. For example, the more global the world and business becomes, the more we find that smaller and smaller groups want to be recognized as their own "countries". Our first reaction is "that can't be", but somehow we see it is. Americans, in particular, like to point at other people and claim they're not free, but what many Americans don't realize how much they've restricted their own freedom by their own standards, or as Ben Franklin once put it, "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety." You know, the Patriot Act, or SOPA, or ... .

One thing that we need is both honesty, especially with ourselves, but also a bit of distance from whatever it is we're going on about. We often think of freedom as the removal of external authorities telling us what to do. Perhaps. But, it is, at best, just part of the picture. In many countries, people have freedom of speech, but even though you can technically say what you want, many don't for concern about what others will think of them if they do. Is that freedom? Yes and no. Is it an external restriction or an inner limitation of one's own? Actually, the latter.

The idea of being free and whether we are free is worth being thought about again. You wouldn't want to end up on the actually side when you really wanted to be truly free.